Two innovative art projects funded by the Neag School’s Rogers Educational Innovation Fund, including a photojournalism art exhibit in Norwalk, Connecticut, and a mural project at a middle school in Hartford, Connecticut, brought together middle school students this past spring. The fund is in place thanks to the support of the late Neag School of Education Professor Emeritus Vincent Rogers and his late wife, Chris, a lifelong teacher. While Professor Rogers wasn’t able to personally enjoy the fruits of the projects his fund supported due to his passing in December 2020, the projects lived on at a middle school and an art gallery.

Even before COVID-19, as many as 1 in 6 young children had a diagnosed mental, behavioral or developmental disorder. New findings suggest a doubling of rates of disorders such as anxiety and depression among children and adolescents during the pandemic. One reason is that children’s well-being is tightly connected to family and community conditions such as stress and financial worries.

This summer, the Center for Education Policy Analysis, Research, and Evaluation (CEPARE) at UConn’s Neag School of Education convened more than 50 principals, assistant principals, educators, and school district leaders from across the state of Connecticut to coach them on fostering social, emotional, and behavioral well-being and safe school environments.

Imagine a group of students not quite out of high school dedicating a considerable chunk of summer break to such activities as interpreting data, carrying out diagnostic coding, and reviewing academic literature — and loving every minute of it.

Thanks to the Young Scholars Senior Summit (YSSS), a three-week program hosted by UConn since 2018 and funded by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, this was the reality for select rising seniors from across the country this past July.

Lisa Sanetti is testing the efficacy of PRIME, a system designed to combat the implementation challenges behavioral interventions face in elementary classrooms.

Glenn Mitoma understands that questions of human rights require careful inquiry and extensive collaboration. His work aims to increase the realization of human rights through education and community programs.

Throughout my teacher preparation program at UConn’s Neag School of Education, I always knew that my first year of teaching would be challenging. However, I never could have imagined the challenges that the year 2020-2021 has brought. This year has brought students in masks with shields over their desks, hybrid learning, block schedules, fully online students, and the struggle to keep students engaged despite the uncertainty of their outside world. All of the teaching and classroom management strategies that I learned in my teacher preparation program now seemed distant as all teachers learned how to adapt and teach in this new learning model.

Allison Lombardi, associate professor of educational psychology in the Neag School of Education, was recently awarded two grants supporting college and career readiness for students with disabilities from the Institute of Educational Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education. Together, the two new awards total more than $1.2 million.

Dr. Violet Jiménez Sims, the associate director of teacher education at Neag, said that education students could meet some of the demand for teachers. Her five-year program partners with 13 districts in the state, and she said that many of these districts hire their graduates. Dr. Niralee Patel-Lye, who directs Neag’s accelerated teacher certification program, said the department recently piloted a program that places students in full-time teaching positions.

Summer school programs help children get better at both reading and mathematics. Students who attend summer school tend to have higher test scores than those who don’t, which means that offering voluntary summer programs is likely to help students catch up from pandemic-related learning slowdowns. And summer learning programs may also improve outcomes beyond test scores, such as by helping students to recover course credits.